VSIX Bootstrapper Microsoft Corporation
winget install --id=Microsoft.VSIXBootstrapper -e An installer that can be chained with other packages to locate the latest VSIXInstaller.exe to use for installing VSIX extensions.
VSIX Bootstrapper is a utility designed to streamline the installation of VSIX extensions by locating the latest version of VSIXInstaller.exe. This tool allows developers to chain it with other packages, ensuring seamless extension installations without manually finding or managing VSIXInstaller.exe.
Key Features:
- Automatic Detection: Automatically locates and uses the latest available VSIXInstaller.exe for installing VSIX extensions.
- Command-Line Support: Accepts command-line arguments that are passed through to VSIXInstaller.exe, enabling flexible customization of installation processes.
- Integration Capability: Designed to integrate with existing deployment pipelines or packages, simplifying extension distribution.
- Cross-Platform Compatibility: Works across different versions of Visual Studio 2017 and newer, ensuring broad compatibility for extension installations.
Audience & Benefit:
Ideal for package developers, ISVs (Independent Software Vendors), and IT professionals who need to deploy VSIX extensions efficiently. By using VSIX Bootstrapper, users can reduce installation complexity, avoid the limitations of MSI-based deployments, and ensure that their extensions are installed using the latest available tools.
This utility provides a reliable and efficient way to manage VSIX extension installations, ensuring compatibility and ease of use across various Visual Studio environments.
README
VSIX Installer Bootstrapper
One of the great new features of Visual Studio 2017 is an initial smaller and fast install. To compliment a smaller - but powerful - initial feature set, installing additional workloads and components on-demand is supported for both end users and package developers.
Package developers can install their VSIX extensions for Visual Studio using this bootstrapper to find the latest version of VSIXInstaller.exe and install their extension(s). This may be preferable for extensions that support Visual Studio 2017 or newer than installing extensions in Windows Installer .msi packages, since MSIs cannot run concurrently in separate processes.
Other deployments may also benefit since they no longer have to find where VSIXInstaller.exe is installed. The command line passed to VSIXBootstrapper.exe is passed through to VSIXInstaller.exe.
See our samples for ideas how to use VSIXBootstrapper.exe.
Feedback
To file issues or suggestions, please use the Issues page for this project on GitHub.
License
This project is licensed under the MIT license.